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PARTISAN REVIEW
and Jack agreed she was "a hot-looking number" and whispered to each
other that some wealthy white women would apparently go to bed with
anybody. All this disappeared in the published version.
Arnold Rampersad, who edited the unabridged Library of America
edition, comments that "the changes in
Native Son
almost emasculated
Bigger Thomas." What he does not point out is that Mary also had her
sexual drive dramatically curtailed, and though this involved more delicate
snipping-a sentence here and there-the effect on the narrative is more
significant. For example, the judges rejected this sentence, when Bigger is
with Bessie: "He placed his hands on her breasts just as he had placed them
on Mary's last night and he was thinking of that while he kissed her." Was
it the sexual explicitness that worried them, or was something else
involved?
Under the guise of sexual censorship there was undoubtedly another
sort of censorship going on. Arnold Rampersad argues that the Book-of–
the-Month Club changes were "the result, not entirely but in part, of
racism-racism that was seldom conscious of itself, that was expressed in
subtle, even benign ways, but racism nonetheless."
If
the judges were uncomfortable with a black man thinking about his
hands on a white woman's breasts, they were even less willing to stand
behind a book in which the white woman
wants
a black man's hands on
her breasts. It was Wright's intention to portray Mary Dalton as somewhat
easy.
Her very name, which we associate with innocence and virginity, was
chosen with a playful sense of irony.
Wright was asked to tone down the goings-on in the car when Bigger,
now employed as the Dalton family chauffeur, drives Mary Dal ton and her
Communist boyfriend Jan home from their inebriated excursion to the
Chicago blackbelt. In the galley version, Bigger glances in the rear-vision
mirror and sees Mary lying Oat on her back and Jan bending over her. He
sees a "faint sweep of white thigh." Then he hears them both sigh.
Realizing what they are up to, he fights off the "stiffening feeling in his
loins." In the published version, all that transpires in the back seat is some
kissing. Even the word "spooning" was cut. The white woman had been
made to sit up and behave. All Bigger now felt was drunk.
Then comes the pivotal scene in which Bigger helps a languorous
Mary Dalton up the stairs and into her bedroom. These sentences the
judges wanted deleted:
He tightened his arms as his lips pressed tightly against hers and he felt
her body moving strongly. The thought and conviction that Jan had
